five minutes with
Publisher
Tom Hilditch tom@hongkongliving.com
Editorial
Editor-in-Chief Shreena Patel shreena@hongkongliving.com Contributing Editor Carolynne Dear carolynne@hongkongliving.com Acting Editor Eric Ho eric@hongkongliving.com Editorial Assistant Trisha Harjani trisha@hongkongliving.com
Design
Design Manager Cindy Suen cindy@hongkongliving.com Graphic Designer Anna Schulteisz anna@hongkongliving.com
Thanks to
Adam White Cora Chan Jessie Yeung Paul Zimmerman Dr. Pauline Taylor Rory Mackay Sam Edwards Stella So Viola Gaskell
Published by
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Photo courtesy of Zoom Ribs
TOM GRUNDY
Co-founder of Hong Kong Free Press, the city’s first independent, non-profit, English-language news source. By Trisha Harjani Have you seen that interview with Richard Ayoade? He talks about how uncomfortable he finds interviews because it’s such an unnatural interaction: I can’t ask you questions back. It just feels weird. Even as a kid I was making family newspapers, radio shows, TV shows as a rather obnoxious sort of mini-Rupert Murdoch. I studied Media and Communications at university but couldn’t afford to enter the industry and do free internships. I came to Hong Kong and taught under the government programme for eight years. I was always writing, I had a column in Time Out and a blog called Hongwrong. When I was younger, I organised protests in the city such as the Support Snowden protests. I would go to the pro-democracy July 1 marches and ran Hongwrong as a blog and advocacy platform. I also ran a domestic worker NGO.
HONG KONG hongkongliving.com
22 | SOUTHSIDE.HK
In 2014, I quit my job and enrolled in a Journalism masters at HKU. Suddenly, the Umbrella Movement happened. I started doing broadcast clips on it for Sky News and BBC, Vocativ, Global
Post, Quartz and tweeting a lot. At Christmas, I built HKFP. We’re based in Cyberport. It was the fastest funded, biggest crowd funding campaign Hong Kong had seen. We got almost four times more than we asked for. Since then, other media have turned to crowdfunding.
We’re strong on underreported stuff, LGBT and women’s issues
In Hong Kong you’re either a huge operation with over 300 staff, loads of resources and a conglomerate or tycoon behind you, or you’re a small start up with fewer than ten staff and you struggle by. There’s very little middle ground. With the HK$600,000 we raise annually, we’re able to keep our heads above water. We don’t have investors - we’re a non-profit.
We are designed to fill a gap between Chinese and English media. Despite a blossoming of independent digital media since the Umbrella Movement, it’s dominated by outfits that are controlled by Chinese conglomerates or proBeijing tycoons. I think there’s room for more diversity. It’s about trying to safeguard and maintain press freedom in Hong Kong. In my ten years here, I’ve seen an erosion of things that differentiate us from the mainland: rule of law, press freedom, freedom of expression, academic freedom. Rather than complain about it, I hope that we’re a positive response to some of the concerns. We’re strong on underreported stuff, LGBT and women’s issues. We did some really good work following the elections and on the bookseller disappearances. One of our writers won an award for her piece on sexual harassment in Hong Kong’s universities. We don’t just measure impact through traffic but also how other media cite our stories. The BBC cited us last week which shows we have enough credibility for international titles to pick up our news.